IATH Best Practices Guide to Digital Panoramic Photography

have developed a number of strategies for dealing with this problem,

including compositing and, more recently, high dynamic range imaging

(HDRI) techniques; but these techniques are generally not straightforward

to implement. A color negative, it could be argued, is in itself a ready-

made high dynamic range image, and while obtaining good scans from

color negatives (especially of high-contrast subjects) is not always the

easiest of tasks, standard image-editing skills can be used to tease out the

desired detail in both highlight and shadow areas (nor will the latter suffer

from the noise often evident in digital images).

At the time of writing, there is much discussion of digital preservation

strategies, and possible long-term problems with archiving media such as

CD and DVD-ROMs. If nothing else, film has certainly proved itself to be

a long-lived and compact data storage medium.

There is also that hard-to-define ‘look’ of film; the grain, the grittiness,

that sets it apart from the digital image with its own characteristics (lack

of grain, color fringing, shadow noise) all of which give it a recognizable

appearance. This is a simple matter of personal preference.

Finally, there is the advantage of being able to revisit and rescan old

negatives as better film scanners become available or your scanning skills

improve. Whatever the reason, a carefully stored negative still has all that

image information locked in its grain structure awaiting reinterpretation. If

we regard scanning as a variation on traditional printing, just another way

of making a final positive image, then a familiar quotation from the great

photographer (and master print-maker) Ansel Adams seems pertinent:

The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print

to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.^1

It would not be so easy for the digital photographer to reinterpret a set of JPEG files
taken for a stitched panorama. Depending on the original exposures, highlight
and shadow details that were not recorded or were clipped are irrecoverable,
and other image qualities, such as white balance, can only be modified by so
much before the image is adversely affected. Having said that, there is a sort of
digital equivalent to the color negative, and that is the RAW file format, a high-

1. Ansel Adams, The Print (Ansel Adams Photography, Book 3) (Boston: New York
   Graphic Society, 1984).